Merial ‘Perk’ Overlade

In Loving Memory

Provo, Utah—’Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man’. This line, from a poem by Sam Walter Foss, was a favorite of our mother, Merial ‘Perk’ Overlade. It reflects on the human experience and subsequent journeys one takes while navigating through life. Her earthly journey completed, Perk died on Sunday, November 20th. She left with no regrets or untamed fears, just a varied selection of unopened bottles of orange toenail polish.

Perk was the daughter of Ella Viola Hafen and Clyde Eugene Perkins and older sister to brothers Hafen, Waldo, and baby Kelly. She is survived by her four daughters: Candy, Stacy, Tracy, and Robyn, nine grandchildren, and 18 great grandchildren.

She was delivered at home in southern Utah, on January 15th, 1924, while her father was away at school. It was his classmates who would ultimately choose her given name, Merial, much to her dismay. Whether ‘Perk’ was a shortened version of ‘Perkins’, or a definitive reflection of the spunky little girl, that is the name, through much persistence on mom’s part, that stuck. At eight years of age, Eugene died tragically, leaving his three young children fatherless. Even then, at that young vulnerable age, our mother’s first concern was for the welfare and care of her siblings. Thus began a lifelong crusade as defender and protector of her two younger brothers, as well as many others who would ‘pass by the side of her road’.

She married her college sweetheart, Lyle Weeks Overlade, in 1949, and they started their family in Las Vegas, Nevada. As Lyle served in the Air Force, Perk, with a bachelor’s degree in English and Music, began her teaching career at Las Vegas High School. Neither athlete or competitor, she was not one to let an opportunity pass, and accepted the only available teaching position offered by joining the physical education department. She could read, understand, and relay rules and information from any sporting manual, and the rest she would figure out.

After living in New Mexico, Spain, Louisiana, and Texas, Lyle’s retirement brought the family back to Utah and to the house with the bright orange doors. Orange popped up everywhere in our mother’s life, from toenails to counter tops; she said it was the ‘happiest’ color. Perk resumed her teaching career at Provo High School, this time in the English department, and strove to pass her love of literature, along with the required dangling participles, to her students. She was diligent and fair and dutifully read every word on every page of every homework assignment, often while sitting in bed with an electric blanket in a bright orange robe. Raising four girls she was simultaneously nursemaid, provider, caretaker and caregiver. She participated in Blue Birds and Girl Scouts and music lessons, supported choir and concerts, debate meets, drill team and track. An accomplished pianist and accompanist, she seldom refused a request to play, despite her own lifelong fear of performing in public.

An avid reader with a current ‘read’ always within reach, while most folks came home with a handful of books from the library, our mother came home with armfuls. She took great pleasure in the gifting of books and all they could offer and spent endless hours in bookstores searching the shelves for new stories and titles to be shared with her grandchildren, her greatest joy of all. ‘Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man’.

Internment Pleasant Grove Cemetery, December 3, 2022.